


Grievances Foregone

by VivWiley



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M, Red and Black
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 19:55:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/840747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VivWiley/pseuds/VivWiley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Krycek contemplates the intricacies of betrayal, time, and planning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grievances Foregone

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The boys belong to CC, I mean no harm--just taking them out for a spin. I'll make sure they're returned nicely washed and with a full tank of gas.
> 
> This is for MustangSally who is teaching me fearlessness -- one careful step at a time.
> 
> My boundless gratitude to CGS, who puts up with way more than any one editor should have to.

I've never been good at long-range planning. The short run has always been my thing. The immediate. Instant gratification. I've always lived moment-by-moment. From pleasure to pleasure. 

The future was always far too uncertain for me to count on, let alone try to shape or attain. There just didn't seem to be any point in investing a lot of energy in worrying about something I was unlikely to have.

I was born a double agent. Triple agent. Mole. Assassin. Saboteur. Opportunist. All of them true. All of them lies. Just masks over masks. I no longer know if my name is my own, or only another fiction. 

But no matter what mask I've worn, I've always known that I didn't have much of a future, so I didn't plan for it.

Mulder was just one more short-term goal. The minute I laid eyes on him, I knew that I wanted him, wanted to possess him. I don't try to explain my needs to myself. I merely act on them. The pull toward Mulder was a dark and familiar need. Something erotic, hot and dangerous--my favorite flavor.

I knew I might not get him, but it was worth trying. I didn't see the danger until much later. Until it was too late. Far too late.

# #

Fuck it.

I'm such a fucking idiot.

I should have killed him. There on the floor of his apartment. Should have shot him right there and then, instead of trying to give him information that might very well kill him in another way, but just might save us all. 

What do I care? I never thought I was going to have a future, anyway. Why didn't I kill him?

If I had simply pulled that trigger, he'd be dead. I could have watched the mocking, tired, ambiguous hazel light slowly dim in his eyes. And I'd be free. And what would the point be of that? Free, sure, but what does that mean, in a life that doesn't even belong to me?

I'm such a fucking idiot.

Resist or serve, I told him. A lie. A false hope. What would I know about it? No matter how hard I resist him, I return again and again to serve this...this....thing that coils around my gut and strangles my heart. This need I have to see him. This bond I would sever, but if I did, I would sever my own soul.

If I still have a soul.

Why is it that I always wax melodramatically lyrical and Russian when I think about him? Why do I only think about my soul when Mulder comes to mind?

Oddly, I think maybe I do still have a soul, though. In that brief instant when I thought so seriously of pulling the trigger, there was a spark in his eyes. A spark I felt clear through the prison that passes for my heart. A connection that defied logic and reason. Then he blinked and it was gone--replaced by the mocking anger and wariness that is his habitual mask when I am there.

But I know it is only a mask. I know that he resists this thing between us as desperately as I do. We fight this thing that is more than attraction, less than love--more frightening and undermining than either. We fight. It is our connection. For now. The only thing we are allowed. All that we will allow ourselves. We do not wish it. But it is. It simply is.

He didn't shoot me, though. I saw his finger twitch, saw it slide along the barrel to curl possessively around the trigger. I saw the rage and possibility race through his eyes, pursed by the hounds of what if and if only.

I gave him a chance to kill me, or to call me back. I needed both, and he gave me neither. We have always reached out to each other only through denial.

Besides, if he'd killed me, he could have actually laid to rest one of his ghosts, the murderer of his father. Mulder could never allow himself that much closure. It would feel too good.

So now I am on the road again. This road is just like the other roads that have slashed through the planes of my life. The roads that have carried me forward, and back and across, but mostly away.

This particular road leads away into a still unknown and unseeable future. It is a road I take toward escape and to survive. It is a road into and through hell.

But I walk it. I ride it. I travel it by hook and crook and stolen car. It is who I am. What I am. The conduit, tool, and pawn of history. A rat in a maze whose confused and twitching movements somehow convey to the answer to riddles being asked by men I can't see.

The grey men. The old men. I feel them in some of the shadows. And therein lies the danger. They lurk only in some of the shadows. The other shadows are my sanctuary. But too often I have stumbled into the wrong shadow, and barely escaped again to tell the tale. And once, the trap slammed shut and I had to chew off my own paw to escape. Well, I did have some help.

I cannot remain in the shadows. So I keep on this road that loops and winds back on itself, ending always and only in hell, because the road always leads away from him.

I should have killed him. I would have killed him. Except that once, he spoke my name with something other than hate or indifference, and the echo of that moment has driven me to all the unexpected and unwanted places since then.

# #

I was young at that point--already evil, already dedicated to nothing except what would get me ahead--but naive. I was so fucking naive. I knew nothing about evil then. Hell, Mulder knew more about it than I did. I just didn't see it at the time.

We had been partners. Even now the now the word twists fresh and sharp through my skin--flaying me with the pain of futures foregone.

Special Agent Alex Krycek. Just another cover, over a cover. Just another mask. A dangerous mask, though, because it was one that tempted me. 

Naive--stupid, brash, still believing in the possibilities of real escape. Real change. Even in myself. Mulder didn't want me--as a partner, a friend, a ....anything. But still. There was something there. Something that he knew, and that I knew. 

For the first time in my life, I started actually making plans beyond tomorrow. Actually allowed myself to contemplate something beyond the immediate. To consider ...fuck it. I hate to consider what a sap I nearly became.

I was given a chance by the men in grey--a chance that promised power, and I took it. Then she was gone. Then I had to go. The first of many escapes. The first of many betrayals. Well, not the first betrayal, but the first that meant something.

Even on the run, I maintained certain...contacts. The conspiracy is more complex and twisted than even Mulder guesses. Loyalties are nothing more than temporary and easily sellable commodities. These men scare even me.

I'd heard through several channels that Mulder was off on yet another case. This one so far off the fucking path that it was clear that Skinner had signed the 302 purely to get him out of the AD's thinning hair. Mulder was disintegrating, and Skinner needed him out of sight for a while to cool the gossips at the Hoover water coolers.

I tracked him down in the back of nowhere, fleabag motel he was staying at. I refused to ask myself why I was going there. Why I would risk the exposure. I simply went.

I found him in his room. He was sitting at the foot of the bed, nearly catatonic. I watched him through the widow first. Lurking in the shrubs outside that seedy building with the peeling paint and half-dimmed neon sign.

He seemed to be watching TV. Then I realized that all he was doing was looking toward the flickering screen. Whatever he was seeing was horrifying, scarring and a million miles from the Lysol-scented room he was slumped in. His face was dead--slack--but his eyes were alive and drowning in some unnamed horror.

I'd intended to simply see him and leave, but something in the desolation of his eyes drew me into that room. He didn't even notice I'd come in the door. There was no reaction at all as I leaned up against the wall. Finally, I closed the door with a click that shocked him back to life.

He began to move for his gun, but half-way through the motion gave up. He slumped back on the foot of the bed and watched me with eyes that were utterly without hope. It occurred to me that he wanted me to kill him.

Mulder's a hero. I say that without irony and without admiration. He is a hero because he still believes in Justice and Truth and all that bullshit, and what's more--he can make people around him believe it too. How else do you explain Scully sticking around for so long?

Mulder inspires an odd loyalty and protectiveness that makes me sick. It makes me sick, because I'm not immune to it, as has been proved over and over.

For the longest time that night we simply sat there watching each other. After a few moments, I knew that he no longer even saw me. His eyes were turned toward me, but the gaze had pulled back to some middle ground that existed nowhere in the space or time that I occupied. 

I watched him, though. I ate him alive. I absorbed him. I fixed his image in my memory molecule by molecule. I memorized the scent of him that managed to insinuate itself past the pine-scent of the room's cleanser, the uneven rhythm of his breathing, the way his tie was pulled slightly off-center at the knot.

Finally, I couldn't stand it any longer. I'd come here against all my better judgment, and I wanted a reaction--I needed him acknowledge my presence. Dammit--he was staring through me as though I was nothing more than another panel in the fake wood shit that covered the walls of that room.

"What? No warm greetings for your long-lost partner?" The sneer in my voice was a long-practiced effect.

He didn't even blink, and his voice was as dead as the desert in his eyes. "You're not my partner. You were never my partner."

"No? Then what am I?"

"I don't really care." He wasn't even going to ask what I was doing there.

"Aren't you even going to ask what I'm doing here?"

He closed his eyes and sighed. "What do you want, Krycek?" The vaguest sneer now echoing in his tone. But it was life--it was contact. 

"I just thought I'd see what had become of the wunderkind. The downfall of the golden Spooky." 

"Shut the fuck up." But the heat was only a tiny flare. A habit.

"Oh c'mon, Mulder. What the fuck are you doing here, chasing wild geese all over this back of nowhere shithole?" Badgering him because I had no other way to connect with him--no other means of reaching him. Why do I bother?

"What are you doing here?" A longer pause this time. "Krycek?" And now there was almost nothing but weariness in his voice. But something in the way he said my name....Jesus....something.

It shocked me into honesty. "I don't know."

For the first time that night he regarded me with something almost like interest. "You were just in the neighborhood?"

"Something like that." His eyes, although scarcely welcoming, gave me the courage to push away from the wall and walk over to him.

"What are you doing here, Mulder?"

"What are any of us doing here?" Being Mulder, he meant the question seriously.

I sat on the bed next to him--overwhelmed almost immediately by the heat and scent and proximity of him.

He turned away from me when I approached him. Not to shut me out, just to impose some distance. He was clearly too weary, or too indifferent to physically move away.

I didn't want his indifference. _I_ needed contact. I needed him. I needed. 

So I touched him.

The skin of his arm, where he'd rolled up his cuffs, was warm and dry to my trembling touch. 

He started under my fingers, my name escaping his lips in a hiss. "Krycek." But he didn't pull away.

"What do you see?" I wasn't even sure what I was asking. I was surprised that my voice came out calm and level.

"Alone. Always alone." It should have been plaintive, but was stated as mere fact.

"You're not alone." I wanted to kill myself. When did I turn into this cliche-spouting asshole? My hand, of its own volition, began to stroke his arm, feeling the rasp of his hairs under my fingers. The smooth skin underneath. I began to imagine that I could actually feel his pulse.

For another long moment he remained motionless under my touch, and then I saw his focus sharpen. Saw him _see_ me. I froze, wondering if lightening would strike me down. Wondering if I would care if it did.

Briefly something that almost looked like humor sparked through the morass of misery polluting his eyes. "No, it would seem that I am not alone." He shook his head and grimaced. I could feel him begin to drift away again. 

Finding courage from the same place that pressed my finger against the trigger during my first assassination, I put my arm around him. I had nothing to lose. I had to touch him. Had to reach out. 

I expected him to pull away, to reach for his gun in earnest this time. I was surprised by the warm weight on him against me. The feel of his face burrowing into my neck. It startled me--frightened me.

This wasn't us. This wasn't who we were. 

The sharp lacerating need that had driven me through this night, to this room, was replaced by an undefinable ache that started in my chest, and radiated out along my arms and legs. I wrapped both arms around him and held him tighter than a concealed knife.

I half-expected him to begin crying and had no idea what the hell I was going to do if he did. But he surprised me again. Always. 

I felt his mouth open against the smooth and rough skin of my neck and chin. Hot, wet lips trailing a path of agonized pleasure. His teeth nipping at my flesh. Bemused by visions of vampires, I was started into momentary stillness.

_Jesus, Mulder. What are you doing? Don't stop. Don't let this be a trap. Don't let this be a dream. What are you doing?_

He didn't stop, and so I had no choice but to move, to reciprocate. Some benevolent, but probably mercurial god was granting me a boon. I would no doubt pay a heavy price for it, but right at that moment, I didn't care what the price would be. I still don't, although I have long since given up hope that I will ever pay the debt in full.

My hands released from befuddled paralysis traveled his back and chest before cradling his head, raising his face. I had to see his eyes. I needed to know what he was thinking. Why he was doing this.

I think I honestly believed for a moment that I could still walk away if I were nothing more than a warm body in a dark and lonely place. You can always lie most effectively to yourself.

I can't answer that question, though, because in his eyes I found recognition and a need and knowledge that matched my own. I started to speak, and was cut off by his mouth lowering across mine, bringing devastation and salvation from the first touch.

Oh god. I've never been kissed like that. As though the simple--although there was nothing simple about it--pressing of lips against lips could merge souls. Could erase time and meaning and the world itself.

I had failed to see the danger. I hadn't been careful, and I had gotten that which I had asked for. At the first kiss I was already so lost that it no longer mattered.

Warm and wet, his lips were confident, demanding. Moving over mine, calling forth a response from depths I didn't know I had. I tried to answer the darkness, the fire. When did I surrender control? Had I ever had control?

You don't control the tides. I slid under the waters of his demand, his need. Lacking oxygen, I breathed in Mulder. Oh god. He tasted of solitude and rage. Soft and hard, the planes and angles of his mouth yielded to my exploration. I gave way before his hands and mouth.

His body beneath my fingers was alive, tense and expectant. My fingers fumbled to remove his tie; clumsily tore at his shirt's buttons. I wanted nothing between us except the secrets and lies that were always there.

His skin was sour sweet with the sweat of the day, and it burned beneath my mouth. Surprisingly responsive. He gave a breathy sound that was almost a moan as I found his nipple and sucked and licked and pulled. The sound wrapped around me--pulled tight, hot, hard. I was so hard. Aching.

His hands tugged impatiently, shedding me of my jacket and t-shirt. Clothes tossed casually, almost violently, to the floor, and then skin met skin. Mouth against mouth again. Greedy, longing, something that felt almost gentle.

Those lips...I had wondered for so long how they would feel. Now that I knew, I didn't know how I would live without them. What that man can do with his mouth....He communicated so much with a simple touch, a subtle pressure. A sweep of his tongue, telling me things I'd only guessed at.

Somehow on a growl and a violent twist, we found ourselves on his bed, stretched out, face to face. Pausing in our frantic exploration of each other, I pulled back to look at his face again. It took what little breath I had left away. 

He was there. Present in a way I had yet to see from him. He saw me clearly, clear through my twisted, yearning soul. Saw parts of me that I had forgotten I'd possessed. A rueful smile, and his hand brought our bodies back into the closest contact. 

Our cocks--hard and ready--pressing into each other as we thrust and thrust with our hips. I freed one hand and eased it between us, shaping his erection, welcoming the instinctive movement of his cock against my hand. So tight and hot. 

Now his mouth was moving across my chest. Teasing, nipping, torturing me with promises unfulfilled, promises undefined. I allowed myself to surrender to his lead. An eternity later, I felt his fingers easing open my jeans, carefully opening the buttons. I reluctantly opened my eyes and dragged myself back to the present to deal with the logistics of wrestling our pants off one another.

It was long past any sort of question of dignity. Speed was the essential thing. A moment of fumbling, and then glorious nakedness. He was beautiful. That, above everything else surprised me, absurdly. Easing him back down onto the bed, I wanted to stop for a moment and look. Do nothing but drink in the sight of him--the slim hips, the brown hair that lightly covered his chest and legs and arms. 

But he was impatient, then, now, always. Tugging me against him, resuming his exploration of my body. Encouraging me to continue my own travels and expeditions across his frame. And who was I to resist? Dangerous and amoral, I might be. Stupid I am not.

I tasted my way down the center line of his chest, struggling a little to keep him still, keep him from wriggling out of my grasp, and then I paused, just breathing in his musky darkness before carefully running my tongue the entire length of his cock. And then stopping. 

"Bastard." The word was a complaint, a laugh, a heart-felt epithet.

"Probably." I licked him again, and then took him in my mouth, hard, silken, twitching.

His groan shook the room, shivering furious and warm through me.

His hips were already rocking restlessly, counterpoint to the rhythm of my strokes. He had lapsed into wordless sounds--tiny moans and whimpers that turned into a long growled protest when I pulled back, and crawled back up to kiss him again, to wrap myself around his body. 

Even at this moment, my arousal piercing me with immediacy and stabbing fire, I could not resist his mouth--his mouth branding my body and that the thin veil of memory that I call a soul. I fed from his mouth -- drawing strength and answers and nourishment from his lips. I was greedy for this. An addict, trying to satisfy a never-ending hunger.

And the hunger grew sharper still. We were helpless before this onslaught of lust and need, a whirlwind sweeping us away. Blowing out of the darkness, extinguishing sanity and reason.

I wanted to wait, to prolong the time, because this would be the only night. Even then I knew the limits of the gods' whims. But neither of us could wait, and so I found myself leaving him briefly to scramble through the pockets of my jacket to find the condoms and the lube.

He was planning to make some smartass comment about being a Boy Scout--I could see the spark in this eye--and then he shook off the thought like water, and simply reached for me.

I came undone.

My hands were shaking so hard he had to help me roll the condom on; his steady touch nearly ending it all before it began. 

I tried to be gentle, but lacked the practice. My fingers found his opening, pressed, invaded, stretched. And then I was buried in him, wondering why it was only now that we were doing this. Wondering how I was going to live never being able to do this again.

And his eyes. His eyes never closed, never left mine, provided my only anchor in a rapidly disintegrating world. 

Stroke.

_this is impossible_

Back.

_this is real_

Deep.

_this is now_

Hot.

_this is only now_

Hard.

And harder, and my hand wrapped around his cock, stroking him in time with my thrusts. Deeper, faster. And now, now, now, and I was beyond any constructs of space or time.

In the extremity of the moment, the only language I could find was Russian. I wondered what Mulder thought of the foreign words, but then was overtaken by the waves of pleasure that washed me over and under and through the surf that drowned me. As I lost my bearings for the final time, I felt him tense and then the spasms of his orgasm wrack him.

At the instant of his release he cried out, "Alex!" The only time he has ever spoken my name in that tone. 

I left before first light, and didn't see him again until Scully was preventing him from killing me. I remain ambivalent about the outcome of that particular meeting.

There have been other encounters. Nothing like that night in his room, though. There never will be again. Time is now forever fragmented into time with Mulder and all the time in between. It is an irrational and illogical distinction, but it is fitting--I am Russian, and melodrama is in my blood, and I eat regret for   
breakfast.

# #

And so once again, leaving, traveling away from him. A kiss for farewell and good luck. Pure whimsy on my part, pure self-torture. I needed the taste and smell of him in my senses before I headed out again. Before I went away.

"Good luck to you, my friend," I said. In Russian. The words were unimportant. The language was. The tone was. Mulder speaks loss and regret as fluently as I. He understood. He chose not to answer. Which was answer enough.

 

END


End file.
